Cities at Dawn

By Geoffrey Nutter Description Reviews Lush, surreal, cinematic, and imagistically precise, Geoffrey Nutter paints the world into his fifth collection of poems. His poems display a consciousness in awe of all matter, be it organic, mechanical, industrial, ornithological, or sartorial. Iridescent and sparkling, his poems are ornate wonders of language, each their own contained ecosystem and civilization. Nutter’s poetry, time and time again, reminds us of our slow divorce from objective reality whose physical resistance to human desire we have always relied upon for proper development. If his poetry infuriates us (and it can; it does), it’s not so much due to its confection but because it relentlessly shows us a world we never really got to know, that makes his poetry so sweet. His poems are full of things that proudly stand distinct from us (e.g., a freight car, maps, statues, steel domes, cigars, steeples, and on and on) as if to remind us that our reply to nature was once to